Entertainment

Pinterest Meets Trip Advisor: Wanderfly Launches New Travel Site

Travel recommendation engine Wanderfly's new site works like a Pinterest built for personalized travel.

The startup unveiled the update at the Launch Festival in San Francisco Wednesday.

As with Wanderfly's previous site, users can browse ideal travel destinations based on duration, price and specific criteria.

For instance, I chose "adventure," "off the beaten path," "authentic" and "food" and received a list of 24 suggestions that included Halifax, Canada; Turku, Finland and Sonoma, California — complete with huge photos to satisfy my armchair-travel appetite.

On the old Wanderfly site, details such as hotel prices, airfare, things to do and the weather were accessible directly from these suggestion pages. The new site instead offers user-generated local recommendations.

"It's personalized travel recommendations not just for cities, but also what you can do in cities," WanderFly co-founder Christy Liu tells Mashable.

You'll be familiar with the site's format. Like many products that have launched in the last year, it works a lot like Pinterest. Users make boards for cities they've been to or are interested in exploring. Within each of their city boards, they add recommendations for specific venues. New content from the people who they are following is delivered in a Facebook-like feed and can easily be saved to their own boards.

When I see Tasting Table has recommended the Early Girl Eatery in Ashville, for instance, I might hit the Save icon attached to it. Since I don't have an Ashviille board yet, Wanderfly automatically creates one for me and sticks an image-focused note about Early Girl within it.

In addition to user-specific city boards, there are also category city boards that collect recommendations for a given city from all users. Their content is based on factors such as what you like (via tags), who you're following and what's most popular.

Wanderfly hand-picked its beta testers for the new site, and they include well-known travel bloggers and brands such as The New York Times. Together they've created about 8,000 pieces of content.

Pinterest surely has much more content in its travel and places section, but it's not built to plan a vacation. Wanderfly's focus on travel discovery is worth the trip to another site.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.